Damascus Sulcus
What Damascus Sulcus is
Damascus Sulcus is a sulcus — a set of parallel grooves and ridges — on Enceladus, 125 km across, centred at 80.6° S, 74.1° E. It is the 20th largest named feature on Enceladus and the 12th largest of its class there.
Where the name comes from
Home city of the merchant Ayyub, father of Ghanim and Fitnah in the "Tale of Ghanim Bin Ayyub, the Distraught, the Thrall Oâ Love." The International Astronomical Union approved the name in 2006, under the theme it applies to every sulcus on Enceladus.
What it would take to settle Damascus Sulcus
Enceladus scores 54.8 as a world. That number is the same for every square metre of it — but sunlight, water, radiation and the ground under your feet are not. This is the same question asked at 80.6° S, 74.1° E.
What this spot has going for it is water — same as everywhere else on this world. What works against it is sunlight — 16% of the sunlight the sunniest latitude on Enceladus gets.
Computed from Damascus Sulcus's catalogued latitude, longitude and feature class — 68% of the model's weight had a basis here, and 3 axes were dropped as not applicable to Enceladus (radiation geometry, earth link, known ground). Gravity, pressure, delta-v and distance from the Sun are the same everywhere on Enceladus and are already counted in the world's own index, not again here.
What this cannot see: elevation. Slope, local shadowing and the polar “peaks of eternal light” — ridge tops near the poles of a barely tilted world that catch sun almost continuously while a crater floor kilometres away never does — need a terrain model this does not have. Where a real mission targets a pole, that is usually why.
What is next to it
The largest sulcus features on Enceladus
All 20 sulci on Enceladus — mapped together, with the naming theme and the size distribution.